Grubby templates [was Somebody hosed grub.conf]

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 13 May 2011 08:43:30 -0600, JC wrote:

> I watched closely as today's kernel update came through:
> 
> >   Installing : kernel-2.6.39-0.rc7.git3.0.fc16.x86_64                       19/37 
> > grubby fatal error: unable to find a suitable template
> 
> Some digging suggests that this is not an uncommon failure mode for
> grubby... https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=124246 dates back to
> 2004.  
> 
> The man page is rather unhelpful on the subject of templates.  I've tried
> restoring older kernel entries to grub.conf from a backup, but that hasn't
> helped a whole lot.
> 
> Anything else I can look at?

Depends on how much debugging you like to do. If the problem is
reproducible for you, you could modify the /sbin/new-kernel-pkg shell script
and make it store its arguments in a file. That script executes grubby,
which is compiled C. Based on what parameters are passed to grubby, it
probably fails to find an existing grub.conf entry that closely matches
the new kernel to be installed. It first tries to copy from the default
entry but if that's not possible tries to locate a matching one starting
with entry 0.

Saving the grub.conf file and grubby args for a test-case might lead
to something.